Most gamers today probably don’t remember that for a while in the 1980s the best-selling, most critically acclaimed computer games didn’t have any graphics at all. They were text adventures and were some of the most innovative and challenging forms of entertainment ever conceived. Historian and documentary filmmaker Jason Scott has spent the last four years interviewing the men and women who created these games. The result is Get Lamp, a fascinating documentary about the history of these games—from the original Adventure, through the rise and fall of Infocom, and up to today’s interactive fiction scene.

Jason Scott is the curator of TextFiles.com and is also the man behind BBS: The Documentary, a look at the computer bulletin board systems that pre-date mass usage of the internet. He’s a regular speaker at hacker and technology conferences and his cat has well over a million followers on Twitter. Really.